Foreign investors have hope, says the New York Times. This reminds me that markets are not rational, not in the short term, anyway:
PARIS — Stocks rose Monday in Europe and Asia as investors awaited the details of the Obama administration’s plan to rescue American banks.
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner will announce the details of the administration’s plan to purchase troubled assets and remove them from the balance sheets, which is aimed at spurring banks to lend more money to consumers and companies.
But this is not hope. This is a desperate desire for greed, for recovering losses, or putting off the day when the margin calls come. Hope is rare among those of us who are not financial “wizards” or those geniuses formerly known as “Masters of the Universe” but we have more of it than they do. Look around you. Your unemployed friends (or yourself) still looking for a job, hoping today will be the day that call will come offering a wage, a health care plan, a chance to pay the rent or get the heat to your home turned back on again. Hope is that wish you can put off for another day a trip to the doctor for your child because her fever will subside on its own, her cough will end, the pained sound of her voice will go away in the morning after a troubled night.
Hope is watching your child at a basketball game, his team over-matched, the team behind by ten points, with only minutes left in the game, gathered together around their coach for a timeout, shouting together as they go back out on the court “Believe!” Hope is getting up each morning, feeling that wave of nausea, and telling yourself it will pass, that today you will feel better. Hope is taking that sad face you see staring out at you, the lines of anxiety over where the money will come from to pay the bills etching ever deeper, and forcing a smile.
Hope is all these things. Hope is not the greed and stale sweat of the investor class grasping at straws, trying to imagine a world in which their scams will work again. That is merely desperation and self delusion, and raw, unmitigated self interest, whether the investor is an individual or an institution.
No, hope cannot reside in the bosoms of such as these. It lives, instead in us, in the dreams we still claim will be our children’s salvation, in the belief that our parents will not die alone and bereft, watched over by oblivious and impassive strangers. Hope that we will find a way back to a better place than where we are now or have ever been. We know hope because it is all we have and all we will ever have.
Some say that hope is a poor platform for a politician. I say, in these times, it is the only platform. For without hope, what will become of us? What world will form in the aftermath of hope’s failures? Not one I would choose to live in.